EXCLUSIVE: TV, film and comic book writer Mark Verheiden has been tapped to co-write with Akiva Goldsman the NBC TV series The Dark Tower. The project is part of a massive joint deal Universal Pictures and NBC Universal TV Entertainment signed back in September to turn Stephen King’s opus of best-selling novels — which have sold more than 30 million copies — into into a feature film trilogy and a TV series, both of them creatively steered by the Oscar-winning team behind A Beautiful Mind and The Da Vinci Code.

Verheiden will executive produce the The Dark Tower series along with Goldsman and his Weed Road Pictures for Universal Media Studios. As previously announced, Ron Howard will direct the series, which is envisioned as a bridge between the first and second movie in the trilogy. This marks Verheiden’s return to NBC and UMS following his turn as a supervising producer on Heroes. He also was a writer/co-exec producer on the NBCU series Battlestar Galactica, which ran on Syfy. He most recently served as a co-executive producer of TNT’s upcoming sci-fi series Falling Skies, from DreamWorks TV. Verheiden, repped by CAA, Untitled and attorney Peter Nelson, is also in business with DreamWorks on the feature side, developing Quatermain for the studio, as well as Ark for Sony Pictures for producers Neal Moritz and Mike Richardson. He has written nearly 125 comic books including The American, Aliens, Predator, The Phantom, Superman and Superman/Batman.